3 ms·
The oldest thing still running I have ever written is a small Perl program that uses OLE to access Word and convert docs to PDF. It has had a few tweaks over t
by forinti 5y ago
The oldest thing still running I have ever written is a small Perl program that uses OLE to access Word and convert docs to PDF.
It has had a few tweaks over the years, and is now nearing 20 years of age. I've used it in different companies I have worked for.
The job I had the most fun at was probably one in which I had to extract data from various documents (xls, doc, etc). All with Perl, of course. I don't think any other language or library would have enabled me to be so productive at this particular task.
So congrats to this wonderful language and its creator, Larry Wall.
- unixhero 5y agoThat is very cool. Maybe you should publish it open source! Nowadays it would be rather easy to do it on python or ruby with a library that reads these filetypes.
- anthk 5y agoPerl already had libraries for those, and zillion more in CPAN. With Rivescript you could even write a chatbot, and OFC the "original" one for Perl was "MegaHal". Also, it made pretty easy to bind the chatbot to an IRC network (and later, MSN and Jabber). Good times.
- weare138 5y agoYears ago I made a Perl AIM bot that used MegaHal has the backend and would turn it loose in chat rooms.
- pkrumins 5y agoI just recently wrote a program that creates CHM files in Perl. Took me like 7 minutes and job was done. All hail Larry Wall!